Field of the Disclosure
This disclosure relates to the field of Internet technologies, and in particular, relates to systems and methods for acquiring, processing, and updating global information.
Description of the Related Art
With the rapid development of e-commerce globalization, cross-region e-commerce transactions are becoming increasingly popular and frequent.
E-commerce services deployed in a large-scale and cross-region distributed environment generally face requirements to update and maintain the consistency of global information. In addition, in order to maintain service continuity, highly efficient updates and global consistency of data and information are required. For example, IP address translation configuration data in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service, or global information of international e-commerce platforms offered by eBay, Amazon, and others are required to be updated, and consistency of global information must be maintained.
In an example where the global information includes routing table data, during the process of implementing e-commerce transactions, data operations of a user at an Internet Data Center (IDC) are involved. In order to rapidly respond to a user's data operation requests and ensure global data consistency, international e-commerce platforms (such as Alibaba, Amazon, and eBay) will generally configure a certain number of IDCs in several regions, assign the nearest IDC to a user based on the user's location, and record the IDC to which the user is assigned in the routing table. Based on the data operation requests from the users serviced by the routing table, the users within each region will be serviced by a nearby IDC and all data operations of a user may be directed to the same IDC.
In practice however, a user may perform cross-region data operations. For example, when a user travels to other cities (or immigrates to another country), the IDC to which the user is assigned needs to be re-assigned, and the routing table needs to be updated to provide a rapid response to the user's data operation request and ensure global data consistency.
Current techniques for updating a routing table generally involve pushing the latest version of an updated routing table to application servers of each region under the control of a Management Control System (MCS) running on the platform. The application server correspondingly returns, updates, confirms, and notifies the MCS after receiving the latest version of the routing table, and suspends data operation requests serving the user.
The MCS then sends an enable instruction based on the latest routing table to the application servers after confirming that the latest version of the routing table is received by all the application servers in each region. Finally, the application servers restore normal service after receiving the enable instruction, which enables the application server in each region to use a uniform routing table to serve the user.
However, in a large-scale, cross-regional update scenario of a routing table, the time consumed by the application servers using the above technique while acquiring the complete, latest version of the routing table is significantly long due to the size of the routing table. Since there are differences in operating conditions such as network link condition, physical distance, and the like, when the application servers in some regions have received the latest version of the routing table other application servers may not have received the latest version of the routing table.
Thus, using current techniques, updating the routing tables by the plurality of application servers may take a significant amount of time. Specifically, during the process of updating data, application servers may suspend services for a significant amount of time, which may result in low service efficiency and user dissatisfaction. Conversely, if an application server immediately provides services upon receiving the latest version of the routing table, and each application server provides these services based on different routing tables, global data inconsistency will result. In addition, other global information in a large-scale and cross-region update scenario may also be subjected to the problem that service efficiency is low or global data is inconsistent.
Therefore, there the efficiency of updating global information using current techniques is poor and problems may arise where both the service efficiency and global data consistency cannot be taken into consideration.